Trusted Explainable AI for 6G-Enabled Edge Cloud Ecosystem

The journey to the next decade of smart cellular connectivity, sixth-generation (6G) networks, has already begun, even though 6G is still in its nascent stages and far from its deployment. In telecommunications, 6G networks have gained the attention of the industry and academia. 6G is planned to succeed the 5G standard with almost 100 times greater speed. One of the exciting features of 6G is Edge Intelligence (EI), which is the coupling of Edge Computing with Artificial Intelligence (AI). So far, EI has yet to be a component of the existing and predecessor communication standards; thus, 6G will open up many opportunities with its deployment in the future. Nonetheless, integration of 6G with EI, in other words, Edge and AI, is also susceptible to various challenges, particularly security and privacy. Therefore, this article proposes a trusted AI-enabled intelligent architecture for the 6G-envisioned Edge Computing platform. The proposed architecture is based on the Explainable AI concept and is mainly used to ensure the security and privacy of the future 6G networks at the Edge. Following this, the work presents a detailed case study of employing the proposed framework. The preliminary discussion indicates some exciting findings and lays the foundation for future research. In a nutshell, the proposed architecture can be extended to different verticals, including, but not limited to, life-critical systems, like e-healthcare, autonomous vehicles, and traffic monitoring.